th his friends; he drank
like a fish, ate like a German, and won ten or twelve thousand francs.
He left the Rocher de Cancale at two o'clock in the morning, slept like
a child, awoke the next morning fresh and rosy, and dressed to go to
the Tuileries, with the intention of taking a ride, after having seen
Paquita, in order to get himself an appetite and dine the better, and so
kill the time.

At the hour mentioned Henri was on the boulevard, saw the carriage,
and gave the counter-word to a man who looked to him like the mulatto.
Hearing the word, the man opened the door and quickly let down the step.
Henri was so rapidly carried through Paris, and his thoughts left him so
little capacity to pay attention to the streets through which he passed,
that he did not know where the carriage stopped. The mulatto let him
into a house, the staircase of which was quite close to the entrance.
This staircase was dark, as was also the landing upon which Henri
was obliged to wait while the mulatto was opening the door of a damp
apartment, fetid and unlit, the chambers of which, barely illuminated
by the candle which his guide found in the ante-chamber, seemed to him
empty and ill furnished, like those of a house the inhabitants of which
are away. He recognized the sensation which he had experienced from the
perusal of one of those romances of Anne Radcliffe, in which the hero
traverses the cold, sombre, and uninhabited saloons of some sad and
desert spot.

At last the mulatto opened the door of a _salon_. The condition of
the old furniture and the dilapidated curtains with which the room was
adorned gave it the air of the reception-room of a house of ill fame.
There was the same pretension to elegance, and the same collection of
things in bad taste, of dust and dirt. Upon a sofa covered with red
Utrecht velvet, by the side of a smoking hearth, the fire of which was
buried in ashes, sat an old, poorly dressed woman, her head capped by
one of those turbans which English women of a certain age have invented
and which would have a mighty success in China, where the artist's ideal
is the monstrous.

The room, the old woman, the cold hearth, all would have chilled love to
death had not Paquita been there, upon an ottoman, in a loose voluptuous
wrapper, free to scatter her gaze of gold and flame, free to show her
arched foot, free of her luminous movements. This first interview
was what every _rendezvous_ must be between persons of passion